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GIFT OF

EUGENICS

•By IRVING FISHER, Ph. D.

'rofessor of Political Economy Yale Uni =

versity Member Board of Scientific

Directors-Eugenic Record Office

Reprinted from GOOD HEALTH MAGAZINE
November, 1913

Good Health Publishing Co.,
Battle Creek, Mich.

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- .

EUGENICS

By IRVING FISHER, Ph. D.

Professor of Political Economy, Yale University; Member
Board of Scientific Directors, Eugenics Record Office

HAVE SOMETIMES SAID THAT EU-
GENICS IS HYGIENE RAISED TO THE
HIGHEST POWER. It is a comparatively
new movement, but one which is sweeping over
the world with wonderful rapidity, and taking
hold of the emotions of mankind in a way that
no other movement has ever done, or has deserved to do.

THIRST OF ALL, what is eugenics? Eugenics, as the Greek
•*• derivation of the word shows, means the science of right
breeding. The word was invented by Sir Francis Galton, of
England, to express his ideal founding a world movement to
improve the human race. It was, of course, a colossal ambition,
and, at first almost everybody scoffed. Even today there are
comparatively few who realize how immediately practical is
this dream of Sir Francis Galton's.

TJ UGENICS DOES NOT MEAN, as many people at first thought,
anything like the old Spartan practice of infanticide. The
Spartans tried to develop a strong, physical race according to
their ideals, and they succeeded, but they did it in a cruel
fashion by ruthlessly exposing children when born. Infanticide
has been practiced in many of the barbarous countries of the
world, and when eugenics was proposed, many people very

283985

2 Eugenics

naturally imagined this was what it meant. But it does not.
Nor does eugenics propose to do violence in any other way to
any humanitarian or Christian effort. Eugenics does not mean,
as some have imagined, compulsory or government-made mar-
riages. Some people have thought that eugenics was some half-
baked scheme to breed the human race as we breed domestic
animals, and to make a race of pug-noses or blond hair or blue
eyes or any other fancy that some master of ceremonies should
conceive. Nor does it mean a reduction in the proportion of
love marriages. On the contrary, it means an increase of such
marriages. Just as soon as men and women come to see and ad-
mire, as in ancient Greece, the ideal of physical perfection they
will fall in love on that basis, as nature always intended that
they should. There will be less interference with love mar-
riages through ambition to acquire property or tirfe.

Eugenics is simply an application of modern science to im-
prove the human race. "But," says the skeptic, "that will
take millions of years!" Nevertheless, I reassert that it is
easily practical to alter and improve the human race and to do
so in a very short time.

THIS IS THE NEW OPTIMISM OF EUGENICS and it is based
on solid evidence. Until recently no one realized how fast
the race could improve if it rvould. Even Galton himself,
when he first proposed eugenics, was under the impression that
we inherit from our ancestors in a way which would make
possible improvement extremely slow. He put forward as a
theory (what we now know to be incorrect) that each child
gets half of its nature from its parents, one quarter from its
grandparents, one-eighth from its great grandparents, one-
sixteenth from its great great grandparents, and so on indefinitely
back, the sum total of those fractions being, when added up to
infinity, just unity or the whole inheritance. Instead of such a
relation Jiolding true, however, we know that a child inherits

Eugenics 3

something from both parents in relation to every character of
body or mind, and that the something which it inherits from its
mother, as by its mother inherited from one (not both) of
its mother's parents, and likewise the something which it in-
herited from the father, was inherited from one (not both) of the
father's parents, and so on in two streams on either side, from
each parent backward. Thus each individual today is in respect
to any one characteristic (such, for example as eye-color) simply
a combination of two beings in any previous generation. One
generation back, it is the two parents from whom he gets his
eye-color; two generations back it is two out of its four grand-
parents and not the other two at all; three generations back,
it is two of its great grandparents and not the other six at ahV
Consequently, if you can carry back your inheritance to some-
one who came over in the Mayflower, the chances are a thous-
and to one, that you did not inherit any given character, such as
eye-color, from that ancestor at all.. In fact, you may have
absolutely nothing in mind or body which came from him. The
marvelous laws of inheritance are "now being fairly well ex-
plained and understood. They were discovered first by a
priest named Mendel, in the year 1869. But when he gave
his discovery to the world, he found the world was blind and
deaf, as it often is to new discoveries, and it waited until the
beginning of the twentieth century, when DeVries and other
scientists re-discovered the Mendelian principle, which today is
the foundation stone of the science of heredity and eugenics.

WE CAN BEST UNDERSTAND MENDEL'S LAWS by taking
a few concrete cases. The first case is that of an And-
alusian fowl. We shall consider the two species, pure bred
black and pure bred white and confine ourselves to observing
the inheritance of the single characteristic, color. Of course,
as long as the black mate only with the black their children
will be black and as long as the white mate with white the

4 Eugenics

children will be white. But if a white mates with a black, the
children will not be either black or white, but blue. All will
be blue. But the most interesting facts appear in the next
generation when these hybrid blue fowls mate with black or the
white or with each other. The original of the cross between the
white and the black is an entirely new color, blue, which may
be considered a sort amalgam of black and white. But a
cross between the blue and the black will not be any new color,
but will be either black or blue — and the chances are even.
That is, in the long run about half of the children of blue and
black parents will be blue and half will be black. None of the
children will be white. So also crossing the blue with the
white will result in half of the children being blue and half
white. Still more curious is the result of mating blue with
blue. One might imagine that in this case all the children would
be blue, but only half will be blue, while a quarter will be
black and a quarter white*

HT^HESE LAWS SEEM STRANGE but at bottom they a"re simply
**" the familar laws of chance, the laws which rule heads and
tails in coin tossing. Two parents are like two baskets or
bundles of traits from which the child takes its traits at ran-
dom. In the wonderful play of Maeterlinck's, called the "Blue-
bird," we are taken to the "land before birth," where the chil-
dren are waiting to be born, having selected their parents to be.
Of course, this is only a pleasant fancy, like the advice of
Oliver Wendell Holmes to children to choose good grand
parents, but it is a useful fancy which will help us to under-
stand the laws of heredity. The child of the Andalusian fowl
takes its color from its two parents on the same principle as a
lottery in which it would take two beans, white or black as the
case might be, from each of two baskets. Every individual is
a sort of basket containing two beans, as it were. It took one
of these two beans from each parent and will give one to each
child.

Eugenics 5

WITH THIS PICTURE OF A BEAN LOTTERY before us it is
• very easy to understood how the colors of Andalusian
fowls are inherited. When two black fowls mate the offspring
must be black, because in this case each parent basket contains
a pair of black beans so to speak, so that the child taking one
black bean from each basket will necessarily have a black pair.
For the same reason the child of two white fowls must be white.
But when a black and white fowl mate the child takes a white
bean from one parent and a black from the other, its own color
being a resultant or amalgam of the two, which in the case of
the Andalusian fowl makes blue. Since every such hybrid child
has this same combination of a white and a black bean all of
these hybrids are alike. All are blue. It is important to
remember that this hybrid blue is only a sort of mechanical
mixture of black and white, and that the black and white are
still separate beans, as it were.

"D UT NOW SUPPOSE A HYBRID OR BLUE FOWL to mate with
■*-* a white. This means that the child takes from the white
parent or basket one of .the two white beafts and from the blue
parent or basket one of the two beans of which one is white and
the other black; the bean taken from the first or white basket
must be white, but that taken from the second or blue or hybrid
basket may be either white or black. It is a lottery with an
even chance of drawing white or black. In the long run half of
the children will draw white and half black. Those which
draw the white will, since they also drew white from the other
parent, be wholly white, but those which drew the black will be
blue^ since they will have one black and one white bean. We
see too that the white child is just as truly white as though it
had not had a hybrid parent, for of the two elements or beans
which the hybrid carried, the black one was left behind untaken.
We see that the blue child is a hybrid exactly like its hybrid
parent, and not any new kind of cross between the blue and the

6 Eugenics

white. In short, the children of a blue and white are either the
one or the other, and not a mixture. In the same way if a blue
mates with a black, half of the children will be black and half
blue.

TJINALLY WE COME TO THE MATING OF A BLUE WITH A
**• BLUE. Here the lottery is to pick a bean from two baskets,
each basket containing a white and a black bean. When at
random one is taken from either of these two baskets there is
an even chance that the bean from the father is white or black
and an even chance that the bean from the mother is white or
black.

1^ OW, what is the chance that the child draws a white bean
■*-^ from both baskets? Evidently it is one chance in four;
for there are four ways equally probable in which you can take
these beans, viz. : ( 1 ) black from the father basket and black
from the mother, (2) white from the father and white from
the mother, (3) white from the father ancT black from the
mother, (4) black from the father and white from the mother.
So the children could draw both white once in four times, both
black once in four, and a white and a black in the other two
cases. And that is why from two blue Andalusian fowls, on
the average you will have one-quarter of the children black, one-
quarter white, and the other two-quarters, blue. Again let us
stop to emphasize the fact that the black children of these hybrids
are just as pure blooded as their black grandparent, and will
mate with other pure-blooded black in exactly the same way as
though there had never been any white in their ancestry. The
white strain has been left behind, or been "bred out."

YjJ/E HAVE SPOKEN OF ONE CHARACTER or characteristic —

™ color. The same laws apply to other characters. Often

different characters are inherited quite independently of one an-

Eugenics 7

other. Each of us is a basket or bundle of very many qualities,
each quality being a little compartment of the basket with two
beans in it. There is, as it were, a pair of beans for every unit
trait, whether that trait relates to color, to musical ability, or to
any one of hundreds of other kinds.

*HpO SUMMARIZE THE LAWS OF INHERITANCE of the unit
**" character called color in Andalusian fowl, we have really
six ways in which we can consider the mating of the three
colored fowls (black, white, blue) : ( 1 ) black may mate with
black, in which case all the offspring will be black, (2) white
may mate with white in which case all the offspring will be
white, (3) a black may mate with a white, in which case the
offspring will all be blue — a hybrid containing both black and
blue elements, (4) blue may mate with a black, in which case
half the offspring will be pure bred black, and half hybrid blue,
(5) a blue may mate with a white, in which case half the off-
spring will be white and half blue, (6) blue may mate with
blue in which case a quarter of the offspring will be white, a
quarter black and a half blue.

These results are the fundamental laws of Mendel. But the
results are not always as clear as in the case of the Andalusian
fowl. In that case tfce hybrids were not like either parent, but
were a new color, blue, so that they were labeled at once and
recognizable as hybrids — but this is not generally the case.
Take, for instance, guinea pigs. What will be the result of mat-
ing an "albino" white with a black guinea pig? Quite exactly
the same principle applies as in the case of the Andalusian fowl,
but the principle is not as clear to see. All the offspring are
hybrid, but they will not be blue: they will be black. They will
look like the black parent, but they are different. The black
color predominates; i. e., black is "dominant" over white, while
the white recedes out of sight, or is "recessive." This hybrid

8 Eugenics

black guinea pig is like the hybrid blue Andalusian fowl. It
is a hybrid, a combination of white and black, but in the guinea
pig the black covers up the white so that nothing in the color re-
veals the fact that it is a hybrid. Now if the hybrid black
offspring of these black and white guinea pigs mate with each
other, the result will follow exactly the same Mendelian law as
applied to the Andalusian fowl. But this will not be so clear,
because now we have two kinds of black instead of a black and
a blue. One child in four will be white like the grandparent.
One child in four will be pure bred black like the grandparent,
and two out of the four will be hybrid black. So to the eye we
shall simply have, out of four children, one white and three
black. But those three black are not all alike. One is a
thoroughbred and two are half-breeds.

DUT HOW THEN ARE WE TO DISTINGUISH between the one
pure bred black, the thoroughbred, and the two blacks that
are hybrids so that we can be sure which is which? The only
way they can be distinguished is to wait to see what their off-
spring will be in the next succeeding generations. The one that
is a thoroughbred will behave like a thoroughbred. For in-
stance, if mated with white they will have nothing but black
children., But if one that is hybrid black mate with one that is
white only half of the children will be white; these white
children reveal the fact that their black parent was a half breed.
Then we can put a tag on that black parent. If proper tags are
put on the blacks so as to distinguish between the pure blooded
and the half blooded — say a blue tag on the hybrids and a
black on the thoroughbreds, — we shall get exactly the same
results as described in the case of the Andalusian fowl, in the
six cases mentioned. The same principles apply to qualities of
guinea pigs other than color. Thus if a long-haired guinea pig
mates with a short-haired guinea pig, all the offspring will be
short-haired, because short hair is dominant over long hair.
Again if a smooth coated guinea pig mates with a rough coated

Eugenics 9

one the result will be rough coated, because a rough coat
is dominant over a smooth coat.

By means of this Mendelian law it is thus possible to predict
what will happen in various cases, not only for animals but for
plants, and not only for the lower animals but for man himself.
Mendel made his experiments mostly with plants. He took
garden peas, twenty-two varieties. He crossed them and he
found that when he crossed a wrinkled pea with a smooth pea all
the children were smooth, but they were hybrids. They did not
show any difference from one of the two parents. They showed
a difference from the others, but they were hybrids nevertheless.
They were not really thoroughbred smooth peas, but they were
hybrid smooth peas. Then he mated these hybrid smooth peas
with each other and the peas in the next generation were one-
quarter wrinkled and three-quarters smooth, but he discovered
that of those three-quarters only one-quarter was really smooth
in the sense that it would breed true ever after. The others
were hybrids and bred just like their parents. Again he
took peas which were tall and mated them with peas that were
dwarfed and he found that all the children were tall.

In other words, the character of being smooth was dominant
and the character of being wrinkled was recessive, while like-
wise the character of being tall was dominant and the character
of being dwarf was recessive.

Again he took peas according to the color of the flower —
those that had purple flowers and those that had white flowers,
and he found that purple was dominant over white. When the
two were crossed the children would be all purple, but hybrid
purple. If these hybrid purples were mated with each other,
he found that one-quarter of the next generation would show
white again according to the Mendelian law; one-quarter would
be thoroughbred purple, and one-half would be hybrid purple.
And so he worked with a number of other varieties of peas and
other plants.

10 Eugenics

Hp HE VARIOUS CHARACTERS OF ROUGH OR SMOOTH, long
haired or short haired, white or black, etc., are inherited
independently of one another. That is to say, the child takes
from the mystic baskets one pair of beans relative to color, an-
other relative to hair length, another relative to coat, and so on,
so that it may be, for instance, long haired and rough coated,
long haired and smooth coated, short haired and rough coated,
or short haired and smooth coated.

This independent inheritance does not always hold true.
Sometimes two traits always go together or always avoid each
other. Again, a particular trait may be dominant to another
trait but recessive to a third, or dominant in the male and re-
cessive in the female. Each case must be studied by itself, but
when the rule is found it can be depended on and used to
predict what will happen in other like cases.

>T«HESE LAWS ARE A CURIOUS MIXTURE of chance and cer-
tainty. In certain circumstances, as we have seen, we can
predict with certainty that the offspring will be black, white,
blue, or whatever the case may be. In other circumstances we
can only state what the chances are. But these chances can be
definitely stated as one in two, one in four or whatever it may
be, and where there are large numbers of offspring this amounts
to a practical certainty that definite proportions will have this or
that color or other characteristics.

Evidently such definite knowledge can be made useful, and
it has been made useful in England. Professor Biffen has
created, to order as it were, in accordance with specifications
drawn up officially, certain new and valuable species of wheat.
This he did by crossing existing species so as to ger"hybrids"
without the undesirable qualities and with the desirable ones.
One species of wheat is resistant to "rust," another has a stout
stalk, another is beardless, another bears a large number of
grains on a stalk, another a large yield per acre, but until
Professor Biffen created it, no species possessed all these possi-

Eugenics 11

bilities. By successive crossing of the existing species, however,
he finally obtained species possessing all of these desirable
qualities. Moreover, the desirable qualities were permanent
because the other or undesirable qualities had been "bred out.'*

HpHE SAME MENDELIAN PRINCIPLES undoubtedly apply to
**" the human race, although as yet only a few traits have been
carefully studied. Eye color is one of these. Imagine a
marriage of a thoroughbred, black-eyed Italian with a thorough-
bred, blue-eyed Irish. What will be the result? All the chil-
dren will be black-eyed, black being dominant over blue; but
these black eyes are not the genuine article that the Italian
parent possessed. They are a blend, and it is only because the
black element dominates over or conceals the blue element that
we cannot see on the surface that there is any blue there. But
it may come out in the next generation; for, if these half-
blooded individuals marry among themselves one-quarter of
their children on the average will be blue-eyed. The other
three-quarters will be black-eyed, but only one-quarter will be
"really and truly" black-eyed, i. e., black-eyed like the Italian.
The remaining half are hybrid black, like the parents. It is
only a sort of imitation black, so to speak.

The appearance of blue eyes in the second generation is the
long observed but formerly mysterious "atavism," or reversion
to the grandparent.

^Text, suppose the children of an Italian and an
A^ IRISH PARENT intermarry with pure bred Italians. We
immediately know what will be the result. All the children
will be black-eyed, but among a large number only half will be
thoroughbred black-eyed. The other half will be "imitation"
black-eyed. The case is just like the mating of hybrid black
guinea pigs with thoroughbred black guinea pigs, or of the
blue fowl with the black. Similarly if the Irish-Italian hybrids

12 Eugenics

marry with pure Irish, half the offspring will be blue-eyed and
half will be hybrid black-eyed.

Black eyes are "dominant" over blue eyes because the black
color is due to a pigment while the blue color is due to the ab-
sence of this pigment. In general a quality which is due to the
presence of some positive element is dominant over a quality due
to the absence of that element. A child inheriting from a blue-
eyed person simply draws a blank from that side in the lottery.

n^HE CASE OF SKIN COLOR in human beings is more compli-
cated. The skin color of an African is, according to the
findings of Doctor Davenport, not a unit character but due to
four factors. Without going into detailed explanations it
follows, and the facts seem to substantiate the conclusion, that
(1) the children (mulattos) of a white and a black parent
have two color factors; and will all be of the same color mid-
way between the colors of the parents; (2) the children of trvo
mulattos will still be mulatto; (3) the offspring (quadroon)
of a mulatto and a white will have one color factor and will all
be alike midway between the parents, thus bringing us to a
unit character. (4) The children of two quadroons will be
quadroons; (5) the children (octoroons) of a quadroon and
a white will be all quadroon color but getting this color from
only one side and drawing a blank as it were from the other
side, they will be quite different from the true quadroons so
that (6) of the children of two octoroons, one-quarter will be
white, one-quarter quadroons and a half octoroons, like the
parents; (7) of the children of octoroons and white half will
be octoroon and half will be white.

It is to be noted that when a white octoroon appears the
black element has disappeared completely so that there is no
danger of its reappearance in later generations from marriage
with Caucasians. This does not mean, however, that all negro

Eugenics 13

characteristics such as wooly hair, flat noses or thick lips, will
disappear. — -^C^

T> UT, YOU SAY, WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH
*~* EUGENICS, and what difference does it make whether eye
color or even skin color is one thing or another? It makes very
little difference, indeed, but there are certain qualities that are
exceedingly important. There are certain qualities which rank
as defective. Feeble mindedness is a lack of a very important
character. Suppose now that a normal or "strong minded"
person, if we may use that term as distinct from feeble-minded,
marries a feeble-minded person. Assuming that the "strong-
minded" person is a "thoroughbred," all of the children will
be apparently normal. None will be feeble-minded. "Strong-
mindedness" is dominant over weak mindedness. Yet all these
children that seem to be perfectly normal lack something in
their bodies. This deficiency is simply covered up but can crop
out in later generations. If two of these hwprids between the
weak-minded and the strong-minded marry each other, one-
quarter of the children will be feeble-minded, one-quarter
thoroughbred strong-minded and the remaining half, though ap-
parently strong-minded, will carry the taint in them just as their
parents did. They are half-breeds. On the other hand, if two
feeble-minded people marry, all of the children will be feeble-
minded. Certainly we can and ought to forbid and prevent
such marriages.

But feeble-mindedness is a recessive quality, so that if the
feeble-minded marry only with normal individuals the feeble-
mindedness does not blight the next generation, and if these ap-
parently normal children of such marriages take pains to marry
only really normal individuals, avoiding not only the feeble-
minded but even those like themselves who have feeble-minded-
ness on one side of their family tree, there will be no feeble
mindedness cropping out in future generations. The same obser-
vations apply to deaf mutism and some other defects.

14 Eugenics

"Out not all human abnormalties are recessive.
*~* Thus Huntington's chorea is dominant, so that every child
of the unfortunate victim of this malady will contract it when it
reaches the right age. Marriages of such people should, there-
fore, never be allowed, even with normal individuals.

But when we propose to restrict marriages or mating of
those unfit to marry, people are apt to say, "That is a dream. It
can't be done." But it can be done and it has been done.
Every one has heard of the cretins in Switzerland. They are a
kind of idiot who are short in stature and afflicted in all cases
with goitre in the neck. Of course, many people have goitre
who are not cretins, but there is no cretin who has not goitre.
These cretins are peculiarly a feeble-minded people. They are
common still in many towns of Switzerland ; they are loathsome
objects, helpless as children, with silly smiles, unable to take care
of themselves in even the simplest toilet ways, and have to be
looked after like domestic animals, or even more closely.

A GENTLEMAN VERY MUCH INTERESTED IN EUGENICS
■**• visited Aosta, in Italy, just outside of Switzerland once in
1900 and again in 1910. In 1900 he found many of these
creatures among the beggars in the streets, in the asylum, in the
home, in the orphan asylum — everywhere he ran across these
awful apologies for human beings. But in 1 9 1 0 he found
only one! What had happened? Simply that a few resolute
intelligent reformers had changed the entire situation. An
isolation institution, or rather trvo institutions, one for the men
and the other for the women, were established. In these the
best care of the inmates was taken as long as they lived, and „

they do not live long. But pains were taken to see that by no \

possibility could marriage or mating of those people take place. t

They forfeited any such rights in return for the care that they
received from the State.

Thus is it possible to apply the laws of heredity as laid
down by Mendel in a thoroughly practical way and to get re-

Eugenics 15

suits immediately in one short generation. It seems, and it is,
a colossal task to change average human nature one iota. Yet
in the light of modern eugenics we could make a new human
race in a hundred years if only people in positions of power
and influence would wake up to the paramount importance of
what eugenics means. And this could be done quietly and
simply without violence to existing ideas of what is right and
proper. It could be done by segregation of the sexes for de-
fectives, feeble-minded, idiots, epileptics, insane, etc. By this
kind of isolation, we can save the blood stream of our race from
a tremendous amount of needless contamination.

And it is being done. The growing tendency to put de-
fectives in institutions, though originally with no such object,
will have the effect of reducing the transmission of defects,
especially when it is recognized that the sexes must be separated
and that the inmates should be kept at the institution through
the reproductive period of life.

O TERILIZATION IS ALSO A MEANS which may be advantage-
^ ously applied in extreme cases. Sensible marriage laws if
backed by an enlightened public opinion can add much. Every
State should have a eugenics board authorized to pass on doubt-
ful cases. But eugenic laws should be enacted only after ap-
proval by those who possess technical knowledge on this sub-
ject, such as Doctor Davenport. Otherwise we are in danger
of foolish, needless and even harmful legislation.

TjEW PEOPLE have any idea, unless they have looked into the
**• pedigrees of some of these people, what awful contamination
can be saved the race by a wise application of eugenics. There
is a family called "the Jukes," all descended from a thriftless
fisherman, born in 1 720. About twelve hundred of these
descendants have been traced in 75 years. Of these, 310 were
professional paupers who spent an aggregate of 2,300 years in
poorhouses, 50 were prostitutes, 7 murderers, 60 habitual

16 Eugenics

thieves and 1 30 common criminals. Dugdale, who compiled
these facts, estimated that the "Juke" family cost the Govern-
ment over $ 1 ,000 for each member of the family. Similarly
the "Tribe of Ishmael," numbering 1 ,692 individuals in six
generations, has produced 1 2 1 known prostitutes and has bred
hundreds of petty thieves, vagrants and murderers. Compare
the descendants of that family with the descendants of Jona-
than Edwards, who was born in the same period (1 703) and
who has had about the same number of descendants (1,394
traced up to 1900). Out of those descendants, something like
half have been public men or men of great distinction and good
influence in the world; 295 were college graduates, about 100
were clergymen or missionaries, over 1 00 were lawyers, 80 held
public office, 75 were officers in the army or navy, 60 were
eminent writers, 30 were judges, 1 3 were college presidents.
A similar example is afforded in the Darwin family, of which,
by the way, Galton was a member. There can be no doubt that
human heredity plays a large role in human character.

A striking example of the contrast between good and bad
heredity is afforded by two sets of descendants from the same
man. An English soldier, a well endowed man, married twice.
His first wife was feeble-minded, his second, a normal woman.
Records of the descendants show a taint of feeble-mindedness
running through the children of the first marriage and none
whatever among the children of the second.

^pHE SUBJECT OF EUGENICS IS INTIMATELY RELATED TO
**■ HYGIENE. Some people have thought that hygiene is op-
posed to eugenics, and in truth this may in many cases be true.
Misapplied hygiene is likely to be injurious to the race. I was
astonished at the ignorance of a university president with whom
I conversed some years ago. He was very enthusiastic over
hygiene and what it can do. He said, "I know of a girl who
had many ailments and disabilities. She had a surgical opera-
tion to remedy one difficulty and special treatment to remedy

Eugenics 17

others, so that finally she was so repaired and improved as to
be made over into quite a respectable human being, and now she
is married. Just think what a wonderful thing that is." Well
the truth was such a result is greatly to be deplored. The hy-
giene was misapplied. This girl was really defective, and the
pity of it is that her children and grandchildren and great
grandchildren are likely to have a certain percentage of defects.
The lives of the insane of this country have been prolonged about
eight years by hygiene. To a certain extent this prolongation
has done harm because the insane have been allowed to breed.
In Connecticut there was a half-witted woman in an asylum, and
a farmer near by, who was also half-witted but was not in the
asylum, asked to marry her. The keeper of the institution
actually did not know any better than to say, "Why, of course,
I will be glad to get rid of her support." And so they married,
and in the course of another generation, both of them came back
to the institution with seven idiotic children! When the superin-
tendent got rid of the woman's support it was a "penny wise and
pound foolish" economy.

But hygiene need not interfere with and may supplement
eugenics. Eugenics is simply the hygiene of future generations.

There are two special points of contact between hygiene and
eugenics which ought to be mentioned. One is in relation to
alcohol. Experiments with hens and with guinea pigs have
shown that merely inhaling fumes of alcohol spoils the germ
plasm and a large percentage of the children of the animals that
have been affected by alcohol have been deformed. The
chickens and the guinea pigs that come from alcoholic an-
cestry will be, according to the Mendelian laws, deformed.
Now we cannot experiment with human beings, but we can ob-
serve (and Forel, in Switzerland, and others have made observa-
tions which, if they do not prove, certainly make it reasonably
certain to any fair minded man or woman) that the alcoholic
taint can and does affect the germ plasm of which future genera-

18 Eugenics

tions are made. It is unreasonable to infer that any unhygienic
habits, even bad diet, may to some extent disturb the germ plasm.

HpHE OTHER POINT OF CONTACT betewen hygiene and
eugenics is called "social hygiene." One of the two great
diseases associated with immorality is inherited and the other
may also blight the child's health, especially as to eye sight. It
is an awful thing to think that any human being can take the
responsibility or run the risk of cursing future generations. Half
of the infantile congenital blindness of the world today comes
about in this way. I knew of a young man who married and
had one normal child. But the second child was born blind.
His doctor explained it to him, that not all who thought them-
selves cured of this disease which he had contracted as a young
man are really cured. As to that disease one can never be
sure whether he is cured or not. In talking to young men on this
subject, I find that the best appeal to them is the eugenic ap-
peal. It does not always work to tell a young man to refrain
from immorality because of the danger to himself. He may
take that as a "dare." Besides it does not put the subject on a
sufficiently high plane. It must be explained to him that it is
wrong and it must be explained to him why it is wrong. Now
it is fundamentally wrong because he carries within his body
the germ plasm of which he is the custodian for future genera-
tions. It does not belong to him. It is not for him to risk or to
injure. It is something that he carries in trust; it is something he
must guard as the most precious possession possible. He must
be on the side of morality because that is being on the side of
the Human race. It is easy to get a young man interested in the
white slave traffic and to^ get him interested to fight the white
slave traffic. As soon as he is interested enough he begins to
see that he cannot be on both sides at once. If he wants to fight
the under world he must not become a traitor to the side for
which he is fighting, and patronizing the underworld is dis-
loyalty of the rankest kind, — the disloyalty to his own family, his

Eugenics 19

own home, as well as to the institution of the family and the
home. I say to young men, "When you are married men you
expect to be faithful and true. You would not respect your
father if he were not faithful to your mother. Carry this a
step farther: when you are engaged, and even before you are
engaged, you should hold it as a matter of honor and of true
fidelity to be just as faithful as after you are married. Another
step: before you are engaged, you owe it to the girl you are
going to get engaged to, to do for her what you would expect
her to do for you, namely, to bring to her a pure body. You
may not know who she is. but she is now living somewhere and
reserving herself for you." It is easy to get young men to see
that the double standard is false and that only the true and old-
fashioned ten commandment morality is right.

^pHIS LEADS ME TO SAY THAT EUGENICS IS A WONDERFUL
A TOUCHSTONE. I believe eugenics will be in the future the
essential foundation of ethics. Today, ethics is purely empirical.
We teach at the mother's knee certain things to be right and cer-
tain things to be wrong, and they generally are right and wrong
respectivelv. And yet we cannot explain why they are right and
wrong. WTien the children ask us "Why?" we usually put them
off by saving "Because it is right," or we put young men off bv
metaphysics and say, "Because of the catagorical imperative,''
as Kant expressed it. But this does not satisfy, and the failure
to satisfy is one reason for immorality in the world. There is not
yet an accepted scientific foundation for right and wrong. I
verily believe that eugenics is going to supply such a foundation.
Some people say thev don't think eugenics is right; they don't
think it is right to talk about these things; they don't think that
it is right to try to interfere with marriage. There are many
things these people don't think is right because they have a false
and conventional standard. But the time will come when, in-
stead of asking whether eugenics is right or wrong according to
some false conventional standard, we shall ask ourselves whether

20 Eugenics

these conventional standards are right or wrong according to
the standard of eugenics, the highest standard there is.

A ND SO IT WILL SOME DAY COME ABOUT that we shall rea-
***■ lize the dream of the founder of this science, Sir Francis
Galton, and will link up eugenics with religion. A generation
ago much was said of the conflict between science and religion;
and it is a curious fact that at first religion frowned on new
scientific discoveries. It frowned on the discoveiy of the ro-
tundity of the earth, of the motion of the earth, of the geological
periods of evolution according to Darwin, and of a great many
other things. Some of the greatest saints in science, like Galileo
and Bruno, were imprisoned and tortured because they would
not prostitute their love of truth for the conventional religion of
the day. Now I was fearful at first that we should have another
unpleasant spectacle of a conflict between conventional religion
and this new science of eugenics, and if you will watch the news-
papers as I have been watching them during the last year, you
will see occasional evidences cf that today. One of the evidences
of it came to me some years ago when David Starr Jordan,
President of Leland Stanford University, and I both spoke be-
fore the New York Peace Society. We talked about the re-
lation of eugenics to war. President Jordan showed that war
was non-eugenic and therefore wrong. War is wrong today be-
cause it takes the very best young men who ought to be the
fathers of the next generation and makes them targets for the
bullets of our neighbors. War is thus a cause of degeneration.
The Napoleonic Wars were largely responsible, President
Jordan thought, for the reduction in stature of the French. The
tall men were sent to war.

7V FTER WE HAD FINISHED our presentation of the subject a
"^^ clergyman got up and said, "I disagree with the gentlemen
who have spoken; men and women are not bred like sheep."
This clergyman condemned at once the ideas we stood for be-

Eugenics 21

cause he had a narrow theological dogma that was impeding in
his brain the reception of a new idea. But I am glad to note
that such men are exceptional today. There is no conflict in
evidence, except in very rare cases, between science and
eugenics. On the contrary, for once in the history of the world,
religion is accepting with open arms this eugenics as a new ally
for morality. Dean Sumner was one of the first to link up re-
ligion with eugenics when he proclaimed in Chicago that in his
church there would thereafter be no marriages solemnized unless
the contracting parties should come prepared with statements
from physicians showing that they were fit to be parents of the
human race. Since he did that, hundreds of clergymen and
scores of clerical bodies and scientific bodies have passed resolu-
tions favoring such a measure.

Come people altogether miss the point of this
& RELIGIOUS SANCTION of eugenic marriages. It is not
that it will prevent any persons from getting married who wish
to outrage eugenic laws. They can easily find plenty of places
where they can get married without medical certificates. But
the fact that religion approves of eugenic marriages and disap-
proves of non-eugenic marriages will reform public opinion and
ultimately make unsuitable marriages as incident as incest is to-
day. This public opinion when it is full grown will not be
simply a dull and lazy approval of eugenics, but a religious
fervor. We shall make of eugenics the biggest pillar of the
church, and eugenics will become embedded in the religion of
the future. It shall happen hereafter that instead of conflicts
between science and religion, these two great human interests will
be marching together, hand in hand.

PROCEEDINGS

The National Conference on Race
Betterment

The National Conference on Race Betterment which con-
vened at Battle Creek January 8th to 1 2th, marked a new era
in human welfare work. At this meeting there came together
leaders in the various movements represented by sociology,
eugenics, biology, physiology, psychology, education, etc.
Among those present were Dr. C. B. Davenport, Director of
the Carnegie Station of Experimental Evolution; Rev. Newell
Dwight Hillis; Hon. Jacob Riis, head of the Jacob Riis
Neighborhood Settlement, New York; Judge Ben Lindsey of
the Denver Juvenile Court; Prof. Graham Taylor, President
of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy; Dr. Win-
field Scott Hall, Professor of Physiology in the Northwestern
University; Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman, Statistician of the
Prudential Life Insurance Company; Mr. E. E. Rittenhouse,
Conservation Commissioner of the Equitable Life Insurance
Company; Dr. J. N. Hurty, Secretary of the Indiana State
Board of Health; Dr. D. A. Sargent, Harvard University;
Mr. Arthur Hunter, Actuary of the New York Life Insurance
Company.

The program covered every field of welfare endeavor and
brought out information that will make possible a basis for a
broader, more intelligent, more efficient social program for the
future.

Proceedings of the Conference have been published in full.
The volume comprises a mine of practical information that
should be available not only to every social worker, but to every
person interested not only in his own welfare, but in that of his
neighborhood. Price one dollar.

Address,

GOOD HEALTH PUBLISHING CO.,

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